Songs and sound. Guitars and stuff.

Tag Archives: 1970s

Nearly a year ago, I wrote a series of posts going over Aimee Mann’s solo records, discussing how her music had developed in arrangement, production and instrument sounds over more than 20 years.

Just towards the end of that process, she previewed a couple of songs from upcoming album Mental Illness, starting with Goose Show Cone. It sounded nice enough but I’d basically listened to no one else for three weeks and I’d had my fill of her music for a while. I figured I’d pick it up at some point soon, but in the event it wasn’t until last week I actually got round to listening to it in full. I’ve listened to it maybe five times now, and I think it’s her strongest in some time, probably since Lost in Space, 15 years ago.

The obvious things first. It was trailed as being her folk-rock move, but it’s actually more of a soft-rock move. In interviews she’s talked a lot about Bread and David Gates as a reference point, and while there are no songs that particularly put me in mind of Bread, the record does seem to be harking back to that era, the early 1970s, with its fingerpicked acoustic guitars and extensive use of vocal harmonies.

It’s a modern record though, so the sounds are bigger, closer and flatter, and there’s a bit more processing on the vocals than I’d like, but overall it’s a nice-sounding album. The string arrangements by Paul Bryan and the harmonies sung by Mann, Bryan, Jonathan Coulter and Ted Leo are the defining musical elements of the album, but drummer Jay Bellerose deserves a lot of credit for his playing on the record. He allows himself to play a full drum kit on only a handful of songs, instead adding shaker, bells, tambourine and other percussion in little touches, here and there – nothing intrusive, nothing that doesn’t serve the song.

As has been the case with Mann’s last few albums, the songs chosen as singles, Goose Snow Cone and Patient Zero, are not necessarily the strongest on the album. Goose Snow Cone suffers from the same malady that afflicted the singles from 2008’s @#%&*! Smilers, 31 Today and Freeway, where the verses and the choruses are each composed of one melodic phrase repeated four times. The (very well sung) vocal harmonies add interest to Goose Snow Cone, but still, it’s a little repetitive over four minutes. Patient Zero, meanwhile, suffers from being a little lyrically involuted. Mann wrote it, she has said, about meeting Andrew Garfield at a party before his career had taken off and thinking he “was obviously kind of freaked out about the vibe of being in that rarefied movie star atmosphere” – which is fine, but why does that make him patient zero? I’m not sure what she’s saying by invoking the term, which is synonymous with the phrase “index case” – the first documented patient in the onset of an epidemiological investigation. The whole song rests on a metaphor that, right now at least, doesn’t reveal itself to me. Neither of these are bad songs, and nor is Lies of Summer, even if it is a musical retread of the brilliant Guys Like Me from Lost in Space, but they are a step down from the best material.

Rollercoasters is a beautiful, painful portrait of someone, possibly with bipolar disorder, unwilling to let go of their life of emotional extremes. On Good For Me, Mann gives voice to someone who knows she’s pursuing a terrible relationship, but can’t stop herself; her high notes are a little huskier than they were, but Mann’s voice is still devastating in its upper ranges. You Never Loved Me has one of Bryan’s best string arrangements, never taking the spotlight from Mann’s vocal or the lovely harmonies.

I’m pretty delighted by this record. Mann, in my view at least, peaked with the Magnolia/Bachelor No. 2/Lost in Space triptych, but that was fine as even on the downslope of her career each new album had three or four really solid songs that I could add to my Aimee Mann playlist. But Mental Illness is way better than that – Mann sounds fully engaged and genuinely enthusiastic about her art for the first time in three or four albums. If you’ve lost interest in her work over the last 10 years, do spend some time with this one.

Desire, the album Bob Dylan made after Blood on the Tracks, is his newly-single-in-New-York-City record. After he and his wife Sara split up, he moved back to New York, living in the Village and carousing at night with a mix of buddies old and new. One night he saw Patti Smith play at The Bitter End and, impressed by the chemistry she had with her band, decided that he should work with a regular band himself in order to get something similar.

He pulled together a motley selection of old pros and youngsters to be in his group (violinist Scarlett Rivera he picked up while he was being driven through the Village in a limousine and she was walking down the road carrying a violin case, which seems borderline predatory today) and went in the studio with a view to recording a new album. At the first session, he had 21 musicians in his band. Nothing usable was recorded, and nothing would be until he took the advice proffered by every experienced musician on the session and attempted the songs again with a much smaller band.

The album was notable in many ways. The lyrics for the songs were written by playwright Jacques Levy rather than Dylan himself; Bob scholar Yo Zushi hypothesises that Dylan had gone to the well so deeply for Blood on the Tracks that he had nothing left to say (at least, nothing about his failing marriage), and was comfortable with the idea of singing someone else’s words. It broke with the studio orthodoxy of the era in its reverberant, big-room sound, and the prominence of Howie Wyeth’s drums in the mix (compare these songs to the very controlled, small-sounding mixes on Blood on the Tracks). Its come-join-the-party beginnings, with 21 musicians on hand for the first session, presaged Dylan’s next wheeze, the Rolling Thunder Revue, which saw him gather everyone from Joan Baez to Mick Ronson (from David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars) to barnstorm up and down the East Coast, playing impromptu gigs in whatever theatre or gymnasium would accommodate them, and bringing famous friends up on stage to join in when playing their home city or if they happened to be in town. A recording of Isis from Montreal begins with Dylan roaring “This is for Leonard if he’s still here” – the “Leonard” in question was indeed that Leonard.

However, the album (and the music from that era of Dylan’s career generally) was only successful in parts. One More Cup of Coffee, which featured Emmylou Harris, was one of the better ones, succeeding on atmosphere and the exotic vocal melody. Allen Ginsberg, whom I assume recognises Jewish singing when he hears it, spoke of Dylan’s “Hebraic cantillation” on this song; to me it sounds more like a muezzin’s call to prayer. But either way, it sets a mysterious and compelling mood that as Ginsberg noted is distinctly non-American – a rare and notable thing in Dylan’s music, considering that he began his career as an impersonator of wandering Okie Woody Guthrie.

The Forgotten Arm was sold to the public as that most prog of things, a concept album: a story in song about two lovers, Caroline and John (a boxer with a habit – Caroline is defined by her reactions to John rather than her own personality), who meet at a state fair and leave Virginia together, only to find that John’s problems are travelling with them.

While the narrative is present throughout all the album’s songs – Mann is too disciplined a writer to drop her concept halfway through – the music that supports the text is far from prog. For The Forgotten Arm, Mann hired a new (for her) cast of studio pros and had them play mid-’70s roots rock in the style of The Faces and Lynyrd Skynyrd (or in the album’s softer moments The Band and Tumbleweed Connection-era Elton John). For some of these players, this sort of meat-and-potatoes country rock was second nature; guitarist Jeff Trott, for example, who made his rep on Sheryl Crow’s second album. Others were slightly removed from their usual sphere; fellow guitarist Julian Coryell is more associated with jazz than cowboy-chord rock.

At times the wailing guitar crosses the line from authentically 1970s into schlock, with the worst excesses come from Trott. On She Really Wants You, he sounds like a wind machine is blowing his hair. His solo on Dear John, which is similar in style, tone and technique, is even more stadium; the vibrato is so foot-on-the-monitor over the top you wonder whether Trott could possibly be being serious.

The Forgotten Arm does have some really good songs*. I’ve gone into bat on this blog for That’s How I Knew this Story Would Break My Heart, and I’m fond too of King of the Jailhouse, She Really Wants You, Going Through the Motions and I Can’t Get My Head Around It. Joe Henry’s production is, for the most part, spare and unobtrusive (that said, the wide-panned mixes of King of the Jailhouse and Going Through the Motions are love-it-or-hate-it stuff), and while the mastering is loud, the lack of steady-state noise in the arrangements means the songs mostly emerge unscathed, if a little misshapen. All in all, though, this is the least Aimee Mann-like album in her discography sonically, and while I can imagine Mann non-fans enjoying it, I doubt many of them got to hear it.

Many artists, when they have been making records long enough, reach a point where each new album is a reaction to the one before it, and much effort is expended in trying to correct the things that the artist didn’t like about the last one.

@#%&*! Smilers does not feature any electric guitar.

But that’s a story for another day. In the meantime, I’ll let you make of that what you will.

Aimee Mann circa The Forgotten Arm

*On my way home I listened to the first couple of songs on The Forgotten Arm and what struck me was that while their verses and choruses are built – as the majority of Mann’s songs are – on repeating four-chord patterns over which Mann sings attractive but narrow-ranging melodies, the middle eights have chord sequences that seem to have been driven by the movement of the melody, giving the chorus more focus and punch when it comes back round.

In my own songwriting, I’ve usually felt that the strongest songs I’ve written have come when the melodies and the chords have either come to me at the same time as each other, or I can hear where I want the tune to go and have to work out what chords work best to support that movement. I’ve written decent songs when I’ve fitted a tune to a predetermined chord sequence (or riff that implied chord changes), but I’ve always felt that writing that way was essentially what rock bands do, and writing from the melody downwards was how “proper” composers write. Horribly snobbish, I know, but old prejudices die hard.

Anyhow, my hunch is that this aspect of Mann’s writing died away after The Forgotten Arm. I’ll look into this and see if it’s true. Yep, listening to songs while counting chord changes. The things I do… For now, it’s more of a side note, as the series of posts is more about engineering, mixing and arrangement than songwriting per se.

Everyone has their own opinion on what makes a great drummer. Some revere Keith Moon for his energy, his invention. They hear passion and a love of music in his gonzo style. His playing does absolutely nothing for me. In fact it drives me up the wall. I hear ego and a wilful deafness to the needs of the song. It makes me physically uncomfortable. I’m tense and on edge whenever anyone puts the Who on, and it’s all Moon.

My kind of drummer says less and means more. Breathes. Leaves spaces. It was a lesson hard learned in my own playing. When I listen back at my own early drumming performances on recordings – and god help me, some of them have been released – the thing that mortifies me most is the overplaying, the desire to fill every space with something, whether necessary or not. So maybe my Moon antipathy is a reflection of what I hate most in my own drumming.

Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason, around the time of Meddle, became one of the kings of saying less and meaning more. He’s never been a flashy drummer (although he was a master of atmosphere), but even so, as Floyd’s music being more conventionally song based, Mason simplified his playing to suit the songs his bandmates were writing.

Fearless is a great case in point. It’s one of those great slow-groove songs that Floyd did so well. At bottom, Mason is just playing boom-boom bap. But it’s the little things that really make the song: his gorgeous ride cymbal sound, that rat-a-tat snare fill in the verses after every second line, the occasional extra bass-drum stroke, knowing when to switch between the hats and ride and, especially, that cymbal crash in time with the snare when Dave Gilmour’s ascending guitar riff lands back on an open G chord. That cymbal hit alone would allow a Floyd fan to know what song Mason was playing if all they could hear was the drums on their own.

Asked about Mason’s playing, Gilmour once said, “Nick’s the right man for the job”. That’s exactly it. He was. Mason suited Pink Floyd and Pink Floyd suited him. Further, Mason had the ability to play for the song while also creating instantly recognisable, even iconic, drum parts. That’s not easy, and Mason did it repeatedly. Fearless is just the example we’re looking at today. I could as easily have chosen Time, Shine On You Crazy Diamond or Wish You Were Here.

Mason in the early 1970s. Note the see-through perspex kit with two bass drums

The following post probably shouldn’t be taken all that seriously. Just a few thoughts I’ve been kicking around for a couple of days.

There is a difference between a great collection of songs and a collection of great songs. Revolver is a collection of (mostly) great songs. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a great collection of songs. Pepper’s songs themselves may not be as strong individually as those on Revolver, but the way they work with each other, flow into and out of each other, mutually support and reinforce each other make Pepper into something greater than the sum of its parts. Revolver may be the consensus choice Best Beatles Album these days, but maybe consensus was right when it lined up behind Pepper.

The Beatles are far from the only band we can play this fun game with. Let it Bleed is a collection of great songs; Exile on Main Street is a great collection of songs. Nevermind is a collection of great songs; In Utero is a great collection of songs. Aja is a collection of great songs; Gaucho is a great collection of songs.

I’ll stop now.

So just as there’s something more to the great collection of songs than just putting together the 10 or 12 best songs you have – something to do with the relationship between the songs themselves that means an objectively “weaker” song might make for a stronger overall collection (in mood, theme, tempo, whatever) – there’s something more to a great final song than just putting a really strong song last on an album.

Now, any discussion about great final songs that doesn’t conclude that A Day in the Life is the best final song ever has reached the wrong conclusion (suggesting Good Vibrations on the basis of Brian Wilson Presents Smile is cheating – it’s not the real record, and you know it). But there are loads of others. Yeesh, just among the Beatles’ catalogue you’ve also got I’ll Be Back and Tomorrow Never Knows.

Bob Dylan gave us It Ain’t Me Babe, It’s All Over Now Baby Blue and Highlands (my favourite “long” Dylan album closer).

Joni never quite managed it – sometimes it felt like she was trying to hard to make grand statements and missing the mark: Judgement of the Moon & Stars and The Silky Veils of Ardor give away their ponderousness in their titles. Shadows & Light in its Hissing of Summer Lawns incarnation is musically too abstract to feel like it belongs with the rest of the record. Both Sides Now deserves to end a better record than Clouds.

Radiohead had a good streak, with Street Spirit and OK Computer‘s The Tourist – particularly the latter, when Jonny Greenwood’s rampant guitar bursts in from nowhere, blasting away the unease and knotty tension of the previous 50 minutes, and ending the record on a note of hard-won liberation.

Spoon, too, with New York Kiss, Chicago at Night and the endlessly wonderful Black Like Me, a winner from its first line on – “I believed that someone’d take care of me tonight”.

R.E.M. did it repeatedly: West of the Fields, Wendell Gee, Find the River, You, Electrolite.

Here’s a list of some favourites. I’ve tried to limit it to records that really stand up as substantial. A good song tacked on at the end of a so-so record isn’t quite what we’re looking for here. You’ll probably notice the usual 1970s and 1990s biases.

LA was crawling with singer-songwriters in the early 1970s, from the stunningly talented likes of Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill, through the foursquare and reliable Jackson Browne/JD Souther types, to the pleasant but inconsequential talents like Ned Doheny and Pamela Polland.

Laurel Canyon is the part that stands for the whole of the LA singer-songwriter scene, but Linda Perhacs was a Topanga Canyon resident, and the difference was all the difference. Physically further removed from Hollywood than Laurel Canyon, Topanga in 1970 was where Neil Young had made his home, and Young’s rather-be-on-my-own attitude epitomised the Topanga spirit. Perhacs was not a joiner or a hustler, wouldn’t have fit in among the more ambitious Laurel Canyon crowd, and indeed would probably never have been heard at all if composer Leonard Rosenman hadn’t have been a patient at the Beverly Hills dental practice where she worked.

In Perhacs’ version of the story, it was only after many appointments that Rosenman asked her what she did when she wasn’t working and, sensing she could be a gateway to the hippie community he wanted to access in order to come up with the right kind of a music for a TV project he was working on, asked to hear the songs she wrote in her spare time.

Rosenman was impressed by what he heard, particularly the song Parallelograms, and told Perhacs he wanted to make an album with her and would secure the budget needed to make it happen.

Hey, Who Really Cares appeared on Parallelograms, and became the theme for Matt Lincoln, the short-lived TV series for which Rosenman had been commissioned to provide music. It’s a stunning piece of work. In feeling and mood, it recalls the moody medievalisms of David Crosby (songs like Guinnevere, Where Will I Be and The Lee Shore) and Clouds-era Joni Mitchell; musically, the fingerpicked chords with ringing E and B strings sound a little like Love (on, for example, Maybe the People Would Be the Times and Alone Again Or). The sinuous bass guitar, meanwhile, reminds me of nothing so much as PFM backing Fabrizio de André. Perhacs’ voice is clear as a bell, often sounding like that of a cut-glass British folk singer. It’s a beautiful song, with some heart-stopping melodic twists and turns, and a wonderful arrangement by Rosenman. If Perhacs isn’t quite up there with Sill, Mitchell, Buckley, Crosby et al., she was light years ahead of many of the cowboy-chord mediocrities whose music receieved greater exposure than hers.

The hype over “rediscovered” artists can be off-putting, and their art seldom lives up to the grand claims made for it. At the time that Linda Perhacs’ 1970 album Parallelograms began to be reissued (and at this point, it’s been reissued five or six times by as many different labels), I was hyper wary – the media fad for freak folk was at its height, and I’d been left mystified by the popularity of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, and astonished at the reverence being afforded to Vashti Bunyan’s 1970 precursor, Just Another Diamond Day. So with Banhart singing Parallelograms‘ praises to the UK monthlies, it seemed wise to steer clear.

A shame. Some records, some artists, really are deserving of their reputations. I’ve chosen Hey, Who Really Cares as a representative track, but if you like it, you’ll dig the whole thing.

So here’s an embarassing confession. I wrote this on an evening train from Manchester to London only to find the next day that I’d already published a piece about this song! Oh well, I like this one better, so I’ve junked the old one. This is what happens when you’ve been running a blog for three and a half years and lack of Wi-Fi means you can’t check your archives…

Imagine an album produced by Ted Templeman, and featuring the instrumental talents of Paul Barrere, Victor Feldman, Michael McDonald, Billy Payne, Klaus Voorman, Herb Pedersen, Fred Tackett, Albert Lee, Chuck Findlay, Jim Horn, Plas Johnson and Eddie Van Halen. Released on Warners, with a cover photo by Joel Bernstein. That record would be basically the most 1970s thing ever. Or maybe the second-most 1970s thing ever, after Rickie Lee Jones’s first album.

That record is Nicolette, the solo debut album by Nicolette Larson, which spawned a huge hit single in her version of Neil Young’s Lotta Love.

Larson had sung backing vocals on Young’s Comes a Time, which featured his own ramshackle reading of Lotta Love, on which he was backed by Crazy Horse rather than the Stray Gators, who were on the rest of the record. Lotta Love, Young has said, was his response to his road crew playing Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours day after day. That isn’t exactly the same as an attempt to write a Fleetwood Mac-style song, and Lotta Love didn’t have the lyrical depth of a Stevie Nicks composition, the deceptively lushness of a Lindsey Buckingham arrangement, or the steady groove of anything graced by John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Frankly, it’s a little hard to hear Young’s reading of Lotta Love as in any way Mac influenced.

Larson’s Lotta Love (which she claimed Young encouraged her to record after she heard the song on a cassette tape Young left in his car), on the other hand, sounds like Stevie Nicks being taken to the disco. The standard mix of the song, rhythmically, is pure Mac, with Fleetwood’s trademark heartbeat kick-drum pattern (most associated with Dreams) present throughout verses and choruses, with a subtle hint of disco in the middle-eight’s four-on-the-floor kick drum and busier hi-hat figures. On top of this rhythmic chassis is electric piano, a prominent sax riff and soul-influenced rhythm guitar, all of which take it a way away from FM territory. Ted Templeman (Doobie Brothers, Van Halen) was an astute producer who knew what would sell. Fleetwood Mac playing disco? In 1978? That’d sell. It did.

Fortunately the record feels a lot less cynical than that makes it sound. Larson had a quite wonderful voice, and on Lotta Love her enthusiasm for the material was palpable. In harmony with Young on Comes a Time, she sounded a little like Emmylou Harris, but on her own record, her voice stood revealed as its own thing: soulful, sweet but slightly husky, and touch of grit in her higher range. With such strong material to work with, the success of Lotta Love was the most natural thing in the world. Unfortunately, Larson (not a prolific songwriter herself) would seldom have such strong material to work with; a forgettable duet with Steve Wariner is her only other notable chart success, and her albums are stuffed with little-known songs by fine writers of the calibre of Andrew Gold, Jackson Browne and Holland-Dozier-Holland, almost as if she was hunting for another Lotta Love in the overlooked work of these big-name writers. It never quite happened; not as simple as it seemed, Lotta Love’s brand of deceptively casual perfection proved impossible to recreate.

Larson died in 1997, of liver failure and cerebral edema. She was 45 – far, far too young.